USCCB: Explain Why Your Bishops Are Hurting Mid-Eastern Bishops

Over the years, a pattern has emerged that can no longer be ignored: The rhetoric of many American bishops is consistently at odds with the pleas of Christian leaders in the Middle East.

It is a scandal for American bishops to disagree with the persecuted Church during the course of a years-long, genocidal attack. Respectfully, I call on the United States Council of Catholic Bishops to address it formally, publicly, and immediately.

To aid in the effort, I have compiled a simple study in contrasts below.

American Clerics on the Radical Islamic Threat and Refugee Resettlement

Before the rise of ISIS, American bishops consistently favored the Obama Administration’s many efforts against border enforcement and the prevention of illegal immigration. In 2010, for instance, the USCCB added its own amicus brief to those of the Obama Department of Justice and the National Council of La Raza in opposition to Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” (SB 1070).

Just after ISIS’s first brutal conquests in 2014, Bishop Denis Madden, then Chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, warned that recent atrocities “intensify our duty to speak out…” He warned not about radical Islamism, but about the “Islamophobia” that was “on the rise” among Christians, whom he censured for “using our religion as an excuse for slander, bigotry or other inhospitable acts.”

Bishop Madden’s message was in keeping with an earlier joint declaration by the Islamic Society of North America and the USCCB, which concluded that much good could come of working “in the spirit of the teachings of the Gospel and the Qur’an:”

Both Jesus and Muhammad loved and cared for all whom they met, especially the poor and oppressed; their teachings and example call for solidarity with the poor, oppressed, homeless, hungry, and needy in today’s world.

More recently, American bishops have combined their enthusiasm for lenient border policies and their concerns about Islamophobia into a single emphatic stance: Advocacy for mass migration from the Middle East. Many bishops protested and condemned President Trump’s executive orders on migration and refugee resettlement. A common theme was that the orders constituted a “Muslim ban,” and that it was irrational and xenophobic to pause and reassess the mass migration of mostly Muslim refugees from Jihad-afflicted countries.

In any case, the resettlement programs that these bishops supported (and now vociferously defend) have been extremely neglectful of the most vulnerable minorities targeted by ISIS. A shocking figure that was widely reported last year: fewer than one half of one percent of Middle Eastern migrants settled in the U.S. were Christian. The numbers of other targeted minorities such as Yezidis have been comparably miniscule.

The USCCB boasts “the largest refugee resettlement agency in the world” and has received fully $91 million per year to operate as a federal contractor maintaining the status-quo refugee resettlement systems of the Obama administration.

Middle Eastern Clerics

Within months of the rise of ISIS, Christian leaders in the Middle East issued a formal statement calling on international powers to take military action against the terrorist threat, and to provide humanitarian aid to refugees displaced by it.

They emphatically condemned the “ideology” of ISIS, and warned that if the international community failed to “destroy” it, a dangerous precedent would be set to the detriment of vulnerable minorities in the future.

The statement made no mention of refugee resettlement in Western countries.

The views of Middle Eastern Christian leaders on mass migration and refugee resettlement are influenced by three factors.

Radical Islamism is finding its way into the West via mass migration and politically correct narratives about Islam

Just after fleeing his diocese with those of his flock who were lucky enough to survive ISIS’s conquest, Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Amel Shimoun Nona of Mosul warned the West, “Our sufferings today are the prelude of those you, Europeans and Western Christians, will also suffer in the near future.”

Western Christians were “welcoming in your countries an ever growing number of Muslims,” but “Islam does not say that all men are equal,” he said. “Your values are not their values. If you do not understand this soon enough, you will become the victims of the enemy you have welcomed in your home.”

In an interview at Crux last year, Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan addressed the recent martyrdom of Fr. Jacques Hamel in France. Younan asked, “Who taught these two young men who slaughtered the priest? Their Imam alienated them as children and as youth, and told them to memorize all the verses of the Qur’an.”

The “literal” reading of the Quran is “the root of the problem,” he said elsewhere, and Westerners should “tell the imams, the teachers of Islam, those directors of Islamic schools – the madrassas – that you can’t teach the children this way, to memorize those verses that call for violence against others.”

Clearly, this politically incorrect wariness of Muslim scripture tends to inform Middle Eastern Christians’ views on the border debate. In the U.S. specifically, Bishop Bawai Soro of the Chaldean Eparchy of St. Peter the Apostle in San Diego, himself a one-time refugee from Iraq, recently wrote a column at The San Diego Union Tribune in which he commended President Trump’s efforts to increase border security.

“Open borders and easygoing immigration policies are what could inflict the U.S. with the fire that has been burning in the Middle East for centuries,” he wrote. “Today’s Europe is a good lesson to America.”

Soro is not alone. Many Middle Eastern immigrants in the U.S. have expressed this sentiment, including Syrian Christians in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Iraq-born commentator Luma Simms, and, as she reports, many of her fellow immigrants from the Middle East. “[As] Middle Eastern Christians know well, there are Muslim immigrants who would use Da’wah to slowly but surely Islamize America,” Simms wrote in a recent column.

Mass migration could destabilize the Middle East, and sap the region of cultural coherency, emboldening Jihadists against those who remain there

Given the amount of rhetoric about refugee resettlement from clerics in the U.S., it’s easy to slip into the habit of automatically associating care for refugees with migration. But when Middle Eastern clerics speak of intervening on behalf of refugees, they are much more often advocating for a) decisive military action against ISIS, and b) funding and supplies to aid the Middle Eastern churches that care for refugees who wish to return to their homes after the destruction of ISIS.

In fact, judging from the consistent pleas of Syrian and Iraqi clergy, American clerics’ emphasis on mass immigration may even be in direct competition with the dire financial needs of the Middle Eastern Church. (Imagine if U.S. bishops asked the Trump administration to allocate some portion of their $91 million in refugee resettlement contracts to meet the needs of the Middle Eastern Church!)

Last year Archbishop Jean-Clément Jeanbart, Melkite Catholic archbishop of Aleppo, Syria, went so far as to say to a Canadian audience, “We’re not happy when we see the Canadian government moving refugees and facilitating their integration. It hurts us. A lot.” Instead, he called for aid to the Churches caring for the displaced.

In a recent interview at Crux, Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil, Iraq dismissed protesters against Trump’s refugee pause, and instead called attention to what the Church in the Middle East has been pleading for since 2014: funding to care for refugees there, in the region, rather than resettlements in the U.S. Critics of Trump’s order “were not protesting when the tens of thousands of displaced Christians my archdiocese has cared for since 2014 received no financial assistance from the U.S. government or the U.N.,” he sarcastically remarked.

“My archdiocese hosts the largest community of displaced Christians in my country, and since 2014, we have received no money from the United States government and no money from the UN.”

Nevertheless, it is unspeakably insulting to refuse priority status to the most targeted minorities who do wish to flee the region

Archbishop Warda approved of President Trump’s plans to prioritize religious minorities who are at the greatest risk, and was offended by protests against what many American bishops called a “Muslim ban.” Detractors should not even use that term, Warda said, “especially now that it has been clarified that it is not [a Muslim ban.]” Those who call it a “Muslim ban” are “hurting we Christians specifically and putting us at greater risk. The executive order has clearly affected Christians and Yazidis and others as well as Muslims.”

“Obviously in the long run, [Trump’s executive order] will make it easier for those from our community who wish to move to the West. And while I hope most of our people will stay, I must respect the decision they make for themselves, especially after what they have endured,” he said.

Again, Warda really seemed quite hurt by the idea of Americans condemning Trump’s prioritization of Christian and other minority refugees. “There were no protests when Syrian Christians were only let in at a rate that was 20 times less than the percentage of their population in Syria,” he said:

…[It] is very hard for me to understand why comfortable people in the West think those who are struggling to survive against genocide, and whose communities are at extreme risk of disappearing completely, should not get some special consideration. We are an ancient people on the verge of extinction because of our commitment to our faith. Will anybody protest for us?

A Final Puzzle

Perhaps the most baffling factor in all this is that the USCCB is extraordinarily well-informed about the needs and complexities facing the persecuted Church in the Middle East—likely much better informed than the both Trump administration and the American public. Briefings written at the behest of the USCCB by envoys sent to the Middle East are quite sound, and even contain vital information not widely known—nor prominently discussed by many bishops—such as:

Christian leaders in the Middle East are bearing the brunt of the refugee crisis, serving countless endangered people of every religion and ethnicity. These bishops and patriarchs have been pleading, to no avail, for the U.S. to allocate funding to aid their efforts to care for refugees locally.

Far from heatedly demanding as a moral imperative the continuation or even acceleration of status-quo refugee resettlement policies in the U.S.—as many American clerics do—Middle Eastern clerics hope for the eradication of ISIS and the prospect of refugees returning to their homes.

The USCCB has even publicly brought such information to the attention of U.S. Government officials. And yet the overall public witness of American bishops bears absolutely no resemblance to the priorities clearly articulated by the bishops and patriarchs targeted by ISIS.

Respectfully, I challenge the leadership of the USCCB to compare and contrast the priorities of the Church in the Middle East with the priorities of American bishops with regard to Islamic terrorism and refugee aid. If it appears some American bishops are failing to wholly represent and advocate for the interests of the persecuted Church as communicated by Middle Eastern Church leaders, I would ask that the USCCB address their failure as a scandal of the first order.

Stephen Herreid is Managing Editor Online at CatholicVote.org, and Executive Producer and Host of the CatholicVote Radio Hour.
He is a Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus. Follow him on Twitter @StephenHerreid.

13 Comments

There is an incredibly obvious reason why the majority of refugees from Syria are Sunni Muslim. Sunni Muslims are the vast majority of the population in Syria.

Christians in Syria are allied with the al-Assad government. This should be obvious to anyone who claims to be paying attention. The Syrian Army is not attacking Christians. The Russian Air Force is not bombing major population centers. The war is being fought by Sunni Muslims against the federal government.

The US has admitted 12,743 Syrian refugees as of Nov. 1, 2016. Out of 4.5 million total refugees. This is .2 percent of the refugee population. No reasonable person would claim this is a random sample.

By your logic, you must admit the US bishops and government are discriminating against Shia Muslims, as the US has taken in even fewer of them than Christians. This wouldn’t be logical, though, because Shia are allied with the government.

Finally, in your support for Trump’s immigration policies, you don’t explain why the US government should not give Shia Muslims, a religious minority at 13 percent of the population, the same level of support as Christians, at 10 percent of the population. Here we clearly see the racism and xenophobia in Trump’s policies. This isn’t about religious minorities. Your lack of support for Shia refugees is quite telling as well.

Lol yes, rather than attack my argument, make baseless claims about the person making the argument. Clearly, you have refuted my argument by putting words on my mouth that I never said.

If you think the Syrian Civil War has no impact on refugees, then there’s no point in having a serious discussion with you. I don’t know that else to say. You simply are denying historical facts.

In your wild claims that I don’t care about ISIS, you probably should address the fact that the Syrian government has essentially allowed the group to occupy parts of Syria, in order to conveniently label all rebel groups fighting the federal government as terrorists.

You might consider that Assad’s nominal ally, Turkey, has been bombing the Kurds fighting ISIS.

You might consider that Iran itself is fighting ISIS in Syria.

Or you can ignore facts and claim that ISIS had somehow created all the refugees.

USCCB is engaging in a subtle form of human trafficking through the refugee re-settlement program. Recently, Catholic Charities tacitly admitted that they need the re-settlement program in U.S. to continue for monetary purposes. Catholic Charities is asking for $8 million because Trump halted refugee re-settlement in U.S. – this implies that they need to continue importing/trafficking human beings into America for profit! Indeed, that is human trafficking, a lowest of the low point for the USCCB.

“Welcoming the stranger” vs. “eradicating our enemies”… Hmmm… which one sounds more like the gospel?

I think it is absolutely legitimate to do all we can to help persecuted Christians and to support Middle Eastern churches that are helping refugees that desire to stay in the area. But on the basic idea that supporting military (more) intervention will somehow lead us to peace, I think that flies in the face of the gospel, reason, and experience.